This contribution deals with the guarantee of individual autonomy in the platform economy. It argues that three necessary conditions for autonomy - intention and privacy, understanding and information, and freedom from coercion - are eroded in a digital economy, in which platforms engage in large-scale surveillance in order to attract advertisers. Even though the EU legal framework presupposes autonomy and has provisions in place that could serve as guarantees for these conditions, it currently fails to protect them. This has consequences for the basis of contracting in the plat-form economy. In order to address the problems in the legal framework, nothing less than a change of thinking about the political economy of informational capitalism is needed.